The Wishes of a Sentence

A sentence has wishes as they decide.

—GERTRUDE STEIN

This past week was a good one: my book, The Art of Brevity, officially came into the world (and hopefully many bookshelves), and I was treated to a party for it by Pegasus Books in Berkeley (photo below). I loved talking about it with people and hearing their questions, which often touched on subjects I hadn’t thought much about.

One person asked me, “What unit of writing are you most focused on in the art of brevity, whether it’s word choice, the sentence, the paragraph, or something larger, like a scene or chapter?”

My answer didn’t take much thought: it’s the sentence.

I love the sentence because, as Gertrude Stein posits, sentences are each their own unique being. A sentence can have sweep and circumference, a swing and a lilt. A sentence can be a fillip or a thud, a tickle or a trickle, a brush or a scratch. A sentence can prick or punch or flow or stop. A sentence can be carried by a cadence or a gust of emotion. It can march in a parade or slink into the background. The words of a sentence can pop and flop, slither and dither, hurtle and chortle.

Sentences are like people. Some sentences revel in their opulence—they live for the show, fulsome and rococo—while others bristle at any unneeded adornment. And then some sentences seem to know nothing more than their function, as if they’re a garbage disposal or a toaster.

The writer Christopher Allen opens his flash-writing workshops with the question, “Which sentence in a flash-length narrative is the most important?” Some students say the first sentence. Some students say the last sentence. Then he tells them it’s a trick question. “It’s every sentence because flash-length narratives don’t allow for spinning wheels and throwaway sentences,” he says.

That’s true. The parts that go into making a short are more noticeable because brevity accentuates them. The shorter the story, the more work a sentence has to do. A sentence must be able to cast shadows through the most careful word choice, create mood with the rhythm and juxtaposition of its words, paint brushstrokes of nuance, and capture the microscopic even as it weaves its way into a string quartet of other sentences.

Sometimes a single sentence can be a story unto itself, but those sentences can take on a variety of characteristics, lengths, contours, and rhythms to form the story. The prime example of the practitioner of a “sentence story” is Lydia Davis. Here, for example, is one of Davis’s better-known but least-voluminous works, “A Double Negative”:

“At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.”

The question: is such a sliver of a thought a story?

To some it might resemble a single somewhat awkward line drawn on a canvas, or an elongated note played on a slide trombone. There is no setting. No characters with names or ages or any kind of detail. And yet there’s a conflict, the choice of whether to have a child, and the contrast between wanting to have a child versus the realization that she doesn’t want “not to have had a child,” and that conflict is pursued over a period of time that reveals a state of mind, implies actions, and yet still holds questions.

There’s a finality in her decision, and yet it’s unstable enough that you have to wonder whether she’s truly committed. It’s a muddled sentence, using the double negative to maximum existential and dramatic effect, so muddled that it requires rereading to truly get its meaning. And then, as a reader, you’re stuck in the double negative, which by definition can never be quite a positive, so you’re left in an odd suspension. The character’s resolution seems unstable, and the resolution requires rethinking.

The language of the sentence is the character of the story, for the narrative is a thought.

Davis’s stories can seem epigrammatic, yet they’re more than that. She doesn’t rely on any grandiosity of language or elaborate sentence structure. Rather, she constructs the lineaments of her story through subtle phrasal maneuvers, tuning it for different sonic impacts, stitching in the tiniest of narrative threads.

Interestingly, Davis’s short “sentence stories” were spawned by her translation of Proust’s long, winding sentences. “I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating Swann’s Way,” she said. “There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn’t want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust’s very long sentences. The sheer length of a thought of his didn’t make me recoil exactly—I loved working on it—but it made me want to see how short a piece of fiction could be that would still have a point to it, and not just be a throwaway joke.”

Enter the long sentence

While Davis’s sentence stories tend to be short and pithy, a sentence story can be winding and rambunctious and breathy as well. Ted McLoof ’s story “Space, Whether, and Why” is told in a single sentence of 1,394 words. The story is not only an achievement of word count but of storytelling. There is nothing extraneous or gorged about McLoof ’s story. Every word and comma feels necessary. In fact, I didn’t even realize it was a single sentence until after reading it, and then I traced back through it looking for a period, but there wasn’t one.

McLoof said the story is about a lack of space, a momentum that takes over a couple’s relationship with such force that they never get to examine their relationship properly. “Each event piggybacks on the last one, and they never get the benefit of perspective, and that dooms them. I wanted the reader to have that same feeling of breathlessness, of an inability to pause even for the length of a period to reflect, because that’s a distance my characters weren’t allowed.”

Sentences, no matter whether they’re long or short, are units of composition, and how they are used in a story affects how they are experienced in an architectural way, with the space in the room allowing different types of drama.

A writer uses words like dabs of color. A word is a solid, something firm and palpable. A good writer listens for the peal of the vowels and the sibilance of consonants, identifying the acoustical zones of a sentence and tuning or mistuning the sounds as needed. The acoustics of a sentence play into a paragraph, into the white spaces on the page, into the air itself.

Excerpted from The Art of Brevity.

Because I have an event in San Francisco

If you’re in the Bay Area, please join me on Feb. 21 at Green Apple on 9th to talk about The Art of Brevity with Melanie Abrams.

If you’re not in the Bay Area, please watch the event.

Because genres want to kiss, too

“A novel, a micro, and a poem go to a bar together. What happens? The novel won’t shut up, so the micro and poem go into the bathroom and start making out.”

—Robert Vaughan

Because I love my community of writers

There are 101 anxieties when a book comes out. Everything from “Is it any good?” to “Will anyone read it?” to, “Damn, how did that typo on page 87 sneak through?”

I've been beyond touched by the kind words people have posted about The Art of Brevity, and I was beyond thrilled at my book launch at Pegasus Books Downtown. Such a great conversation led by my good friend and 100 Word Story co-founder Lynn Mundell and such challenging and fun crowd questions.

In this regard, I always want more, not less, so I'm sad the strictures of a constraint ended the evening.

Because more about me

I am the executive director of National Novel Writing Month, the co-founder of 100 Word Story, and an Executive Producer of the upcoming TV show America’s Next Great Author. I am the author of a bunch of books and the co-host of the podcast Write-minded.

My essays on creative writing have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer.

For more, go to grantfaulkner.com, or follow me on Twitter or Instagram.